Microsoft has been very protective over its OEM pricing, and while various figures float around the web, the company has never really confirmed or denied any of them. At the Jefferies Annual Technology Conference, however, Charles Songhurst, general manager of Corporate Strategy, revealed some of the pricing details for OEMs.

Not to mention Windows (and/or OS X) is a true value for the person who wants a computer that works without having to recompile their kernel to enable an Nvidia driver, or dick around with software updates that break working configurations (wireless on ubuntu).

Not to mention Windows (and/or OS X) is a true value for the person who wants a computer that works without having to recompile their kernel to enable an Nvidia driver, or dick around with software updates that break working configurations (wireless on ubuntu).

Which pretty much covers 98.99% of the computing public.

Exactly the opposite experience on my Lenovo S10e netbook. Wireless drivers still do not work correctly, yet Ubuntu 9.04 just works.
In general, now there is less hassle in Ubuntu about drivers than in Windows.

Exactly the opposite experience on my Lenovo S10e netbook. Wireless drivers still do not work correctly, yet Ubuntu 9.04 just works.
In general, now there is less hassle in Ubuntu about drivers than in Windows.

Off topic: it's very annoying that people report success stories with ath5k driver, creating an illusion about it being a decent driver. It's not, it's a piece of cr*p that works quite unreliably (slow, flaky connection) for many users. Probably something to do with noise levels.

I still have to use ndiswrapper on my asus eee 900 / jaunty for this reason. It's nowhere near close enough to motivate me to sell my soul and switch to windows though.